In the article Orcs,
Wraiths, Wights: Tolkien’s Images of Evil; Shippey talks about the origin of
evil. What makes something evil? He says, “Wickedness is always…the pursuit of
some good in the wrong way.” This is precisely how the characters become bad
or evil in the first place. I do not remember the story of Sauron or how he
became evil, but with the characters we do know of in Lord of the Rings, they
started with intent to do good. The nine kings wanted to protect their
kingdoms, Saruman wanted to understand what had to be done in order to overcome
Sauron. They made conscious choices to probe into the secrets and the
darkness. There are others whom I do not feel necessarily had a choice, the Uruk-hai
created by Saruman to take over Middle Earth. Gollum had more choice in the
matter, he sees the ring and it has an overpowering effect on him. So much so
that he begins to be overcome by its influence, and this influence in a sense
causes the stronger part of him, Gollum, to take control and the good, Sméagol,
to be ruled over.

Shippey also makes an
interesting point when he analyzes the discussion between Shagrat and Gorbag
when they find Frodo at Cirith Ungol he says, “What the episode with Shagrat
and Gorbag reveals is that orcs are moral beings, with an underlying morality
much the same as ours.” However, if that is true, it seems that an underlying
morality has no effect at all on actual behavior. How, then is an essentially
correct theory of good and evil corrupted? If one starts from a sound moral
basis, how can things go so disastrously wrong? It should require no
demonstration to show that this is one of the vital questions raised with
particular force during the twentieth century, in which the most civilized
people have often committed the worst atrocities. Tolkien deserves credit for
noting the problem, and refusing to turn his back on it, as so many of his
canonical literary contemporaries did. Shippey also mentions that Tolkien “Insists
in several places that evil has no great power. It ‘mocks’ and does not
make.’”

One critic, a
Fritz Leiber, believed Tolkien’s villains to be “merely sneaks, bullies and
resentful cowards.” The image Tolkien seems to be portraying in Lord of the
Rings is not that of monsters that jump out at you, it is more the feeling of
‘real’ evil, evil as viewed by Christians. Tolkien’s characters talk about it
during the book when Pippin and Beregond hear the Black Riders and see them
swoop on Faramir in “The Siege of Gondor”,

“Suddenly
as they talked they were stricken dumb, frozen as it were to listening stones.
Pippin cowered down with his hands pressed to his ears; but Beregond…remained there,
stiffened, staring out with starting eyes. Pippin knew the shuddering cry that
he had heard: it was the same that he had heard long ago in the Marish of the
Shire, but now it was grown in power and hatred, piercing the heart with a
poisonous despair.”

Shippey 191

Tolkien’s image of
evil goes much deeper than being scared by monsters, it is something you feel
in your bones. To me scary monsters are things you read of in children’s books
or horror stories. Tolkien’s desire was to create something real, something
people could actually understand. The evil we see in Lord of the Rings is
something everyone can relate with, the bully who got immense pleasure from the
pain of others, just as the orcs do.

Another form of evil we
come across in the course of the book is the image of the ‘Ringwraith’ the OED
gives this definition of a wraith, “An apparition or specter of a dead person;
a phantom or ghost.” It also says a wraith is, “An immaterial or spectral
appearance of a living being.” Both seem to have had bearing on Tolkien, his
wraiths should be dead but are clearly still alive in some form. Shippey asks
an interesting question when he gives the etymology of the word “wraith” coming
from the Anglo-Saxon “to twist” or “to writhe” Shippey asks, “Could ‘wraith’
not be from the same root as writhe?” The word wrath also derives from wraith,
which parallels the old English gebolgen, “angry, swollen with rage.” In the
books wraiths are not exactly ‘immaterial’ rather they are something derived by
their shape more than by their substance. Shippey goes on to mention that, “As
LOTR develops, it becomes clear that though the Ringwraiths so have physical
capacities, their real weapon is psychological; they disarm their victims by
striking with fear and despair.” There are even characters that show the first
signs of becoming wraiths such as Bilbo, with his perpetual anger at Gandalf,
or Frodo starting to become transparent. Wraiths do share one quality with
orcs, in both we can see, if faintly, an element of goodness perverted, of evil
as a mistake, something insidious.

Shippey proceeds to sum
his argument by saying, “Middle earth certainly has an appeal based on its
landscape, its characters, its revival of romance; but this would be purely
superficial without its animating themes of power, evil, and corruption. Sauron
and the Ringwraiths, Big Brother and the party, the pigs head and the
choirboys: these have been the defining images of evil—wholly original, highly
varied, oddly consistent-for a culture and a century, which had too close a
contact with evil for more traditional images of it to seem any longer entirely
adequate.”